“We need a goddamn federal response,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development who ran USAID’s Office of U.S. Foreign Disaster Assistance in the Obama administration, told me on Wednesday. As countries around the world that have managed COVID-19 have cautiously begun to shift back toward normalcy, the United States continues to break records of new reported cases. Among public health officials and pandemic experts that I spoke to, the blame rests squarely with the White House. “We need them to fucking do something. It really remains the biggest weakness and it is why we’re seeing this kind of a second spike when no other comparable peer country is,” Konyndyk added.
With Donald Trump unwilling to take responsibility early in the pandemic, the response was left to governors and local officials, creating incoherency and inconsistency across the country. Konyndyk likened the novel coronavirus to burning embers left out after a fire. When states moved too quickly to reopen, it was “giving the fire a ton more oxygen.” The surge in cases in states like Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona, and California was sadly predictable. A spike in one state leaves every other susceptible. “We’re seeing right now the effect of having a 50-state approach to this pandemic and not a United States approach to this pandemic,” said Beth Cameron, a former civil servant who ran the White House’s National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense under Obama. “We tried a patchwork approach. It failed. Now we need a unified approach.”
“I don’t think people realize that the whole country remains as vulnerable as it did on day one,” said a former official who served in the Trump administration.
After months of mixed messaging from the White House, any expectation that Trump—seemingly singularly focused on restarting the economy, once his best hope of winning reelection in November—will suddenly lead the country out of this pandemic feels misguided. After all, more than 130,000 Americans had to die from COVID-19 before the president donned a mask in public. “This is horrifying, the situation we’re in right now, and is a direct result of a White House failing to take ownership of [its] role as the lead in a national disaster, a 50-state disaster, and to provide strong, clear policies that would guide an entire nation,” Juliette Kayyem, a former Department of Homeland Security official in the Obama administration who played a critical role in the H1N1 crisis, told me. “Instead you had a president who was fighting the science, questioning the scientists, undermining what we knew would stop the virus, pushing for early openings and seeming untouched by the impact that this was having on the American public. Just seems impervious.” In recent days, Trump has appeared more focused on beans than the coronavirus crisis.
Shockingly, the administration seems to be turning away from science and public health experts instead of running toward them as the virus ravages the country. “There’s such a lack of clear thinking by people that are in positions of leadership,” the former official told me. “Either they’re totally stupid or they’re totally corrupt.” White House officials, under a cloak of anonymity, kept busy planting attacks in the press against Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, earlier this week.
One official, trade adviser Peter Navarro wrote an op-ed for USA Today, in which he said, “Fauci has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Fauci, for his part, continues down the high road. “I don’t like the conflict. I’m an apolitical person. I don’t like to be pitted against the president,” he told Norah O’Donnell in an interview for InStyle magazine. “It’s pretty tough walking a tightrope while trying to get your message out and people are trying to pit you against the president. It’s very stressful.”